A Movie A Day: Quint has a FLASHBACK (1990)The '90s are going to make the '60s look like the '50s.

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
With today’s film we follow actor Cliff de Young over from SHOCK TREATMENT, where he attempted to fill Barry Bostwick’s shoes as Brad Majors. In 1990’s FLASHBACK he plays a small town sheriff running for Congress. He’s a heavy, a crooked cop, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
FLASHBACK was probably thought up as being a way to take MIDNIGHT RUN’s winning odd couple comedy formula of a man hired to escort a fugitive to justice, but to use it as a vehicle to bring Dennis Hopper back into the mainstream.
Instead of the bounty hunter/bail skipper relationship from MIDNIGHT RUN we have an FBI agent (Keifer Sutherland) and an ex-radical hippie (Dennis Hopper) traveling north to Oregon for a hearing.
Maybe it was me coming straight off of SHOCK TREATMENT, a film I didn’t enjoy, but FLASHBACK wasn’t a horrendous piece of shit to me. There’s at least a narrative and a chemistry between Hopper and Sutherland.
That by no means excuses the faults of the film. I can look at something like SHOCK TREATMENT and despite my distaste for it, I can recognize that it is probably somebody’s favorite film. Somewhere in the world there is a person who loves it for all the reasons I don’t and to them that is their favorite movie. Then I look at FLASHBACK and even though I thought it was okay and worth the watch I don’t think it is anybody’s favorite movie.
The film is middle of the road, balancing the good chemistry and clever lines with some horrendous winking at the camera (Hopper has a line where he says "It takes more than going down to the local video store and renting Easy Rider to become a rebel" for instance), terrible jumps in logic (who knew Oregon bordered Canada?) and radical character shifts.
Following the Midnight Run formula, you know that the uptight young FBI agent will eventually relate to the old hippie, but the way they do it in this movie stops it dead in its tracks. While on the run from a pissed off Sheriff (de Young… who somehow goes from upstanding local Sheriff to a blood thirsty madman because he roughed up Sutherland before he knew he was an FBI agent… now he wants to kill them both in order to get the win on his upcoming election… I probably spent more time talking about it here than they do illustrating his motives in the movie) Sutherland lucks out and happens to be in the very woods he grew up in, revealing that his parents were big hippies living on a commune in Oregon and he grew up there.
The commune is abandoned, save for an aging hippie chick (Carol Kane) and thank god she has a 16mm projector because watching a (very long) home movie is what makes Sutherland remember the beauty of being a hippie.
Sutherland plays the character shift for all it is worth and I give him credit, but the story just didn’t give him enough time and relied too heavily on convenience to force the story into the Midnight Run formula.
Keep a look out for Sam’s dad from SIXTEEN CANDLES, Mr. Paul Dooley, as Sutherland’s FBI boss as well as a pair of comic relief characters (ex-hippies struggling in the ‘80s world) played by Richard Masur and Michael McKean. They are a little wasted in the flick, but it was still fun watching them work.
Final thoughts… It’s fun seeing young Jack Bauer in action, although at this time in Sutherland’s life he still looked more Ace Merrill/David from Lost Boys than Bauer. The sheer number of ‘80s character actors, the charisma of Hopper and the laughs the movie does deliver make it worth giving it a watch at some point, but it’s not good enough to go out of your way to find it. It’s not a bad distraction, but it’s not great cinema either. Plus it has a great soundtrack... lots of Rolling Stones and Steppenwolf.
The schedule for the next 7 days is:
Thursday, July 3rd: KLUTE (1971)
Friday, July 4th: ON GOLDEN POND (1982)
Saturday, July 5th: THE COWBOYS (1972)
Sunday, July 6th: THE ALAMO (1960)
Monday, July 7th: SANDS OF IWO JIMA (1950)
Tuesday, July 8th: WAKE OF THE RED WITCH (1949)
Wednesday, July 9th: D.O.A. (1950)
Tomorrow we hit the rewind button, zip past Keifer Sutherland’s teen years, childhood, infancy, past his mom’s pregnancy and follow his daddy’s sperm back inside his body… Well, not literally, but the connection is we’re jumping from Keifer to Donald, hitting 1971’s thriller KLUTE starring Sutherland, Jane Fonda and the late, great Roy Scheider.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com

Quint, I can't believe you've never seen Flashback! And I can't believe that, having never seen it, you decided to go ahead and watch it. Certainly there are some better movies you haven't seen you could have watched instead.<br><br>Like Flashdance, for instance. Have you seen that? If not, you need to fill that gap right away.

Yes, I have seen Flashdance. That gap needn't be filled. I didn't promise every movie on my list was grade A cinema. I got plenty of that, too. It's good to cover all my bases, though, hit every genre... and hell... I like Keifer Sutherland and Dennis Hopper. Why wouldn't I want to see them work together?

I'm going to follow John Stockwell to John Carpenter's Christine. Damn, I loved that movie. Unfortunately, my project is apparently going to be rewatching movies I've already seen, instead of getting to the hundreds of movies I haven't.

Thanks to this article/feature by Quint, I saw Hole in the Head. It is a wonderful film. And when the boy meets his version of Marilyn Monroe I almost cried.
<p>Thanks also for posting the previous movies at the end of this article. It was fun to go back and see what you had written. My Netflix Queue is way behind your list, so I'll be going back to previous reviews as they arrive.

oh, and rodriguez is no longer getting rob zombie's sloppy seconds...he and mcgowan are splitsville...guess this means she aint gonna be red sonja...shit, 15 years ago, this dude would be happy getting such prime pussy...hey harry, better watch your spouse, rodriguez is on the loose again

... my Dad's best friend's favorite movie. He is a former burnout who bacame a rich lawyer. The guy still has the soundtrack (in his Porshe boxter, no less) and blasts that "Big Audio Dynamite" song from the end credits all the freakin' time. Lovely guy, really.

really? weren't they going to make barbarella too? this is good news actually, i'd rather see more sin city or a lot of other things really. rose mcgowan is hot though, her personality would have to be pretty lame to give her the old heave hoe

maybe the pressure to make rose a star finally got to the dear boy...she has now been dumped by two heavyweights....oh, did i say rob zombie...meant to say marilyn manson...i get my rockers confused sometimes...and i guess this is the end for remake city for robert, and i agree, this is much better for him and his career...if i was him, i would give a call to dita von tease...he needs to bang all of manson's exes

Oh dear movie gods let this be the event that causes Rodriguez to shrug, call up Danny Trejo and Jeff Fahey and go film the rest of Machete on the weekend. Then have it direct to DVD and in my hands by next week. Thanks.

Rodriguez was pretty lame to give the mother of his children the Heave Hoe. All for a piece of ass. Granted a pretty fine piece of ass... but none the less.
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I know she's nuts, but I actually think Lindsay Lohan would make a better Barbarella.

The nineties were pretty dire times for the movies in my opinion. The music industry was certainly better off in the nineties than now, if for hip hop alone, but I'm not sure about the film industry. Of course there are always good movies but for me the nineties was the apex of the cookie cutter studio blockbuster/prestige picture. I think the rise of independent filmmakers like Tarantino/Soderbergh/P.T.Anderson/Fincher etc. gave way to what we have today, ie. directors like Nolan getting huge studio movies like Batman instead of Joel Schumacher. I kind of look at the nineties as the necessary growth period to get to the 00s. I mean if I had to choose between the best films of the nineties and the best films of 05-08 alone I'd probably take the latter. Of course, this is all just conjecture and these things are cyclical. I kind of liken the crest we are riding that started in the mid-nineties to the effect that films like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde had in the sixties, not that I can speak knowledgeably about it since I wasn't alive, but a bunch of maverick types came along and broke all the rules and shattered all the formulas and laid down new ones. And we got a good chunk of the best films ever made during the 70s as a result. I'm quite sure none of this makes actual sense, but let me ramble dammit.

I'm glad to see you've kept the column going for a whole month. It's speaks highly of you. I should do something like this with my own DVD collection. But I'm also lucky enough to have the current revitalized revival scene happening in L.A. This is the first AMAD I've read in a while because I've been so busy. I may catch up with what I missed.

PC thugs everywhere. Went to university from 92-97. Ug!
Anti-freedom of expression!
My university was filled with either Lisa Simpsons (PC Thugs) or young neo-cons.
No sense of humor, everything was taken seriously. Feminism was replaced by man hating neo-feminism.
The 90's fucking sucked!

On a personal level, the 90s were a brutal assault on several fronts. That basically continued until early 2004. Musically, it’s no fucking contest. 90s music kicks the asses of both the 80s and 00s. Movies: I’ll take 90s indie movies over this decade’s Hollywood. I think this decade is far worse for cookie cutter studio crap. Yes, 2007 was the best movie year since 1999 and the big tent pole flicks this summer are much better than usual. (Albeit, there are a number I haven’t seen yet. I’ve been really busy.) Generally speaking, you’ve had to search for the really good movies this decade. They haven’t been at multiplexes. South Korea, Asia, and the more fringe indie movies— ones that don’t get Independent Spirit Awards attention— are where it’s at this decade. I hope between the internet and new technologies that a giant rip is torn in pop culture allowing all kinds of cool vibrant music and movies to emerge. <p> As for personal freedoms, I want to be around for the massive orgy when the cure for AIDS is discovered. Wouldn’t it be nice if it happened in the next year? I can dream, can’t I?

and...and I know you get a lot of suggestion on what you should see so if you don't want another stop reading...have you seen Ginger Snaps? It's my favourite Canadian Horror film (eat it Scanners) and it's got Mimi Rogers in it, there's got to be a connection to another film you could make in there somewhere.

I have indeed seen Ginger Snaps... even interviewed Emily Perkins for it back in the day... and confessed my deep crush on her that I developed as a kid watching her in Stephen King's IT. And I never got a restraining order leveled against me, so double-win!

I love this movie and always have. I just rewatched it recently and given what's happening these days it's still relevent. And funny : " Shot in the back by a pair of cruise missles ". A really entertaining film for our times.

...and that's all it was ever supposed to be. It seems that way too many motherfuckers seem to forget that sometimes being fun is enough, especially if that's all you set out to be in the first place. Not every film needs to significant, or be a work of art, or a cinematic mindfuck, or whatever. There is a place for all brands of cinema, and the only thing that matters is if they achieved what they set out to be or not. That's the ultimate measuring stick. Flashback just wanted to be a fun bit of hokum, and from memory (though I haven't seen it in years) it was. End of story.

It is one of my favorite films, and one of the few original movie poster prints that I shelled out cash for.<p>
autographed, no less.<p>
Yeah its campy 'rescripted western in WW2' stuff, but it tries to tell a version of that horrifically bloody battle much in the way that the Greeks retold stories of the fall of Troy and the fall of the Spartans - those were horribly bloody and savage events, but in the retelling, they're transformed into heroic epics that display the greatest of human achievement. Thats what Sands of Iwo Jima tries to do: retell a very grisly and nightmarish event in a way to pay homage to those who went through it - to glorify in sanitized technicolor, the savagery and butchery they endured to take that tiny but important scrap of sand.<p>
You're just going to love it, Quint. Love it.

I remember liking Flashback. Saw it when it first came out in video may years ago. It's the chemistry between Keifer Sutherland and Dennis Hopper that makes it work. Not as well done as Midnight Run, but still a decent odd-couple buddy road movie.

"The nineties were pretty dire times for the movies in my opinion..." I'll pick a few from just two years, (plenty of good films in the other 8 as well) the prove that statement WRONG! U R full -O- crap dude: 1995: Apollo 13, Casino, Dead Man Walking, Get Shorty, Heat, Leaving Las Vegas, Se7en, Toy Story, 12 Monkeys, The Usual Suspects. 1999: American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, Boy's Don't Cry, The Cider House Rules, Cookie's Fortune, Dogma, Eyes Wide Shut, The Green Mile, The Insider, The Limey, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow, The Straight Story, Summer of Sam, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Toy Story 2

You JUST beat me to the obscure Amiga game reference there johnnylawless.
Anyhoo, as for the film I rented this in it's first month or so from my video shop. I watched it for the second time the very next day. It was then years before I caught it again (it's never shown on TV here - in the UK) and it was pretty much how I remembered it. I still enjoyed it. I own the soundtrack and even convined others to see under the guise of a 24 prequel (hey it WAS Kiefer going after Hopper. A similar device can be used to trick people to watch Renegades - hey is that going to be on your list QUINT?)
Anyway, I very much like the part when they're watching the films of lil Sutherland at the hippy commune, and the use of the song 'People Get Ready' as the train pulls off. And B.A.D.'s Free at the end is great too.

I think you're talking to me, not Mr. Sinister. Right after what you quoted I said "Of course there are always good movies". You named some. Personally a lot of the stuff on your list wouldn't make mine (Dogma, Sleepy Hollow, Get Shorty, The Sixth Sense, bunches more.) But different strokes I guess. To your 95 list I'd add Casino, Dead Man, La Haine, Welcome to the Dollhouse, others. To your 99 list I'd add American Movie, Audition, Fight Club, Ghost Dog, Magnolia, Mr. Death, Office Space, Ravenous, others. The nineties had tons of great films. Goodfellas, Miller's Crossing, Terminator 2, Silence of the Lambs, The Indian Runner, JFK, Unforgiven, Schindler's List, Dazed and Confused, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, I'm just going to stop here because I've only skimmed the first couple years of the nineties and I could go on and on. There will always be good films. And as I mentioned above the nineties birthed some of the most important filmmakers working today, like any decade of course. But my point is that the nineties were pretty shitty on a whole. Action movies were big gimmicky formula vehicles for stars or shitty effects. Remember disaster films? God, it got to the point that we got two shitty volcano movies at the same time. So many of the nineties blockbusters are basically unwatchable today because of their lousy effects, which ran the risk of replacing story altogether for a while. The nineties killed Star Wars, slowly and painfully. Schumacher's Batman movies sum up everything I hate about nineties blockbusters. Moving on, horror movies were dead for half of the decade and then when Scream came along the second half of nineties horror became increasingly inferior rip-offs of Scream. The same thing effectively happened to the thriller genre with Seven. Nineties movies were full of terrible "alternative" music. Everything was gaudier in the nineties. Anyway, there's only so long I can ramble here, I just think that the studios were less willing to take chances on the types of films that you and I have named than they are today.

Do you think the 1990s invented the "Action movies were big gimmicky formula vehicles for stars or shitty effects. Remember disaster films?" Um, hello, "Airport"? "The Towering Inferno"? The disaster film you described was born in the almighty 70s? Why do the people who kiss 70s films ass (and some of them deserve to be smooched) conveniently forget by far the biggest star of the mid to late 1970s was Burt Reynolds? That fucking "Benji" and the ultrashitty "Billy Jack" were mega hits. Lets not put the rosecolored glasses on for the past...

Congratulations on making the 1 month anniversary and here's to many many more. And don't listen to the self-appointed "cineastes" who bemoan your supposed lack of encyclopedic knowledge of all things film - truth be told we all have films we're ashamed we havent seen - one of mine being - well - Klute, coming up. As for the accusation that you see dreck, some of my most treasured films were ones i bought or rented simply by taking chances and feel lucky to have uncovered little gems like "The Offence", which I'd argue was easily Sean Connery's greatest acting perf, or "Last Exit to Brooklyn", great nihilist outlook, or even "Paradise", shamelessly flaunting Phoebe Cates luscious tits. Kudos to you, sir, kudos to you.

Connery is even better in The Hill. Check it out some time if you haven't already, fantastic film. But his best ever performance, or my favourite at the very least, was in The Man Who Would Be King, opposite the equally "never-been-better" Michael Caine. Every fan of quality cinema owes it to themselves to see those two.

Excellent nuff said. This film has a lot of sentimental value to me so to me it can do no wrong I'm just happy somebody else recognised it. It's like Nothing To Lose although not as good; one of those little buddy movies that slipped under the radar as years went on.